Paul LÉAUTAUD (1872-1956). L.A.S., [Fontenay aux Roses] April 7, 1951, to Mme Berthier in Nogent le Roi; 3pages in-8, envelope. Extraordinary letter about his life, his loves, his tastes for a "graphological portrait"... "I am certainly an unconformist through all my distrust and mockery, from my adolescence onwards for all moral, civic, romantic, sentimental, family, social, etc. etc., bullshit. I have only ever had one rule: pleasure [...] I have only ever written for my pleasure. [...] I have always lived alone and enjoyed being alone. As a child, from the age of five to 10, living with my father and the old maid who raised me, and never having had my mother, I lived hidden under the dining room table. [...] I don't need anyone's company. A good armchair, silence, something to write with. I have the most interesting company in my head". On his loves. "I've only ever loved physically [...] I've had two or three long affairs (away from home, my home having [sic] inviolable). My partner would have died during the exercise, complete indifference. [...] in love, it's never me who started it. [...] I like women, I don't like women. And I've never liked young women. The age of love, for men and women, [...] is forty. Body and face, life has put the most delicious marks and expressions on us"... He has been employed all his life, and free from the censures of "printed paper directors". Although "wild, gruff, manic", he met with nothing but sympathy, particularly from the director of the Mercure de France (Alfred Vallette), "a man to whom I owe everything as a writer". He then summarizes his life from the time he left the local school, his literary training "in great nights of reading", his employment as a clerk in a solicitor's office, then the secretariat of the Mercure de France from 1908 to 1941. He also describes his musical tastes, with Rossini and Italian music, and his taste in painting: "Chardin, La Tour, la Rosalba, Greuze, Houdon, Manet, Courbet, landscape painters like Pissaro and Boudin, and certain English painters". For him, the great era was the 18th century: "We were 'European' for good [...] A veritable apogee of a happy, unhappy society, without hatred or prejudice. We'll never see that again. So: down with democracy"...